Apartments Designed for Living–now there’s an idea!

The other evening, I was walking through the hip and happen’ Boston Ink Block, and I noticed this sign on an apartment building:

Now, when I was young, I lived in a few pretty crappy places.

In my first apartment, my senior year in college, we had a major cleanup when we moved in, including throwing out a raft of empty whiskey bottles from underneath the claw foot tub. It goes without saying that the claw foot tub required quite the scrub.

The building also featured a pit-of-hell trash system. You threw your trash down an asbestos-lined chute that I believed went directly into the maw of the furnace. Now this can’t possibly be true – or can it? – but it sure seemed that way. One of the neighbors on our floor either didn’t understand the plot – throw your trash down the chute – or was too scared to open the door. Anyway, they’d leave their open trash in seeping brown paper sacks on the floor of the tiny little room that contained the trash chute. As I recall, they ate a ton of chicken – this is the pre-boneless skinless era. Yuck.

I did a couple of stints in cheapo, poorly constructed “modern” apartment buildings. All these decades on, I can still conjure the shag rug smell right into my nostrils. Yuck.

I had an apartment that in the early 1900’s served as immigrant housing in Boston’s West End. The West End is largely gone, but “my” building stood until a decade or so back, when Mass General hoovered it up and tore it down. One of the swell features of this was some of those left-over turn of the century immigrants shouting their heads off all day. One little old Italian lady was perpetually yelling what sounded like “io”, the Italian word for I. There was also a tenant named Chiang Kai Shok – not to be confused with Chiang Kai Shek – who also made a fair amount of noise. The lady with the Manx cats didn’t make a lot of noise, but she let those cats roam the halls.

There was an old timey toilet – with the raised tank and the pull chain flusher – a tiny little bathtub you couldn’t sit it. And no sink in the bathroom. You had to use the kitchen sink.

My flat looked out on a gas station that abutted – and I do mean abutted – the apartment building out back. A fellow whose window opened onto the roof of the gas station regularly let his two Doberman Pinschers out to crap on the gas station roof. Yuck. I only lasted one summer there.

From that place, I upgraded to a much smaller but much nicer apartment on Beacon Hill proper. In the kitchen, there was a dumbwaiter that we used to send our trash down to the live-in super to dispose of. My adjoining neighbor and I both used the same dumbwaiter, and if we both opened the dumbwaiter door at the same time, we were staring into each other’s eyeballs and kitchens. My dumbwaiter neighbor was a very, very old man whose nickname was Babby. Babby had a companion (what we’d now call a home health aide), an older woman but younger than Babby. She sat with him most days. Anyway, Babby and his aide (I can picture her but can’t remember her name) much enjoyed opening their dumbwaiter door to listen in on what was happening in my single gal apartment. It was great sport to tiptoe into the kitchen and yank the door open so that I could catch the eavesdropping/spying. (I was the only person under the age of 60 – which seemed pretty old to me way back then - living in the building. Another neighbor once told me that Babby had told him that he’d overhead “tickling” noises coming from my apartment.)

All of these places had distinct downsides and flaws, but I can still say with great certainty that each and every one of these apartments was an APARTMENT DESIGNED FOR LIVING.

Seriously, is there any other kind???

My sister Trish suggested that deathtraps aren’t designed for living. But they’re not exactly designed for death, are they? They just end up that way, a by-product of shoddy build.

Anyway, as a long-time marketer, I’m sure I’ve written plenty of things that are pretty darned dumb and pretty darned obvious. Still, nothing quite like this.

Sure, the Ink Block is a cool area. There’s a Whole Food right across the street, and the ability to just run across the way to pick up some Ben & Jerry’s or a pre-fab meal makes for some mighty fine living. Still…

I’m assuming that the apartments all have bathrooms, kitchens, and a closet or two. Heat. AC. Running water. Other than that, what – pray tell – does designed for living mean?